Let’s be reasonable: No one was expecting cinema gold from an August release in which Jason Statham fights a big prehistoric shark. But The Megstill failed to live up to our low expectations. Critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sat down to discuss why on the latest (and final) Film Club.

Cats and turtles figure prominently into Madeline’s Madeline. The title character, an emotionally tempestuous New York teenager looking to channel her volatile feelings into acting, likes to role-play as a feline, purring and nuzzling on anyone in her radius, and sometimes to pantomime the slow crawl of a shelled…

Based, as the opening credits pronounce, on “some fo real, fo real shit,” Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is a riotous mess of contradictions: a true story that seems too outrageous to actually be true, a period piece that’s also a red-alert bulletin on current affairs, a very funny comedy about the very unfunny business…

On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss the latest from Spike Lee, which tells the bizarre true story of Ron Stallworth, a black detective for the Colorado Springs Police Department who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by posing as a white…

On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky take a look at Disney’s new live-action Christopher Robin,inspired by the Winnie The Pooh stories by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard. In a Hook-esque twist, Christopher Robin follows a now grown-up, workaholic Christopher whose inner child…

There’s a scene in The Darkest Minds, Hollywood’s latest attempt to turn a teen-lit bestseller into a multiplex sensation,where the heroes literally compare themselves to Harry Potter. Well, one of them does, anyway. Her name is Ruby (Amandla Stenberg, a veteran of this genre, given her role as Rue in the original …

One of these days, Tom Cruise is going to seriously hurt himself. It’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it? Cruise, who just turned 56 but still throws himself into every role like a teenager certain of his own invincibility, has a new Mission: Impossible movie out, the terrifically exciting Fallout. The star’s insistence on…

Only about 30 rocket-paced minutes have whizzed by before Mission: Impossible­—Fallout first flirts with truly impossible odds. Ethan Hunt, the human missile of American intelligence that Tom Cruise has been popping back in to play for more than 20 years now, is masquerading as a mysterious terrorist, the perfectly…

Welcome back to another edition of Film Club. For this week’s second episode , A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky follow up their discussion of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Againwith a look at another lazy sequel. Although Denzel Washington has proven himself to be a credible action star in the past (see his collaborations…

For the first of two Film Club segments today, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky discuss the jukebox musical Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a combination sequel and prequel to the 2008 box-office hit. Even with a new writer-director (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s Ol Parker), Here We Go Again learns nothing…

When Unfriendedhit theaters in the technologically primitive past of three years ago, it looked like a brand-new kind of movie. Unfolding exclusively across the LCD canvas of a terrified teen’s desktop, this ingenious ghost-in-the-machine potboiler spoke a distinctly modern language, telling its hoary horror story of…

He doesn’t wear a costume or even go by the titular moniker. All the same, Robert McCall, the ex-special-ops vigilante Denzel Washington plays in The Equalizer and its crummy new sequel, is essentially a superhero. Like Spider-Man, he seems to possess a kind of infallible danger sense, and he shares with Batman keen…

Sometimes it feels like Hollywood is just one giant recycling center: In goes the existing intellectual property, out come the sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations. So it’s a little sad when a movie not based on something people already love flops, if only because it could hurt the chances of execs investing…

A couple of years ago, a strange blip appeared on the music-sales matrix. Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” an infectious dollop of alt-rock ear candy that hit the radio like a sugar rush a decade and a half prior, was suddenly back in heavy rotation. There it was, sitting pretty at No. 16 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs…

On this edition of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s latest star vehicleSkyscraper, the newest addition to Hollywood’s vast stable of Die Hard knockoffs, with the action in this entry taking place in The Pearl, a building that comfortably dwarfs Die…